It was late on a rainy fall day, and a college freshman named Rey was showing me the new tattoo on his arm. It commemorated his 500-mile hike through Europe the previous summer, which happened also to be, he said, the last time he was happy. We sat together for a while in his room talking, his tattoo of a piece with his spiky brown hair, oversize tribal earrings and very baggy jeans. He showed me a photo of himself and his girlfriend kissing, pointed out his small drum kit, a bass guitar that lay next to his rumpled clothes and towels and empty bottles of green tea, one full of dried flowers, and the ink self-portraits and drawings of nudes that he had tacked to the walls. Thick jasmine incense competed with his cigarette smoke. He changed the music on his laptop with the melancholy, slightly startled air of a college boy on his own for the first time.

Reys story, though, had some unusual dimensions. The elite college he began attending last year in New York City, with its academically competitive, fresh-faced students, happened to be a womens school, Barnard. Thats because when Rey first entered the freshman class, he was a woman.

Rey, who asked that neither his last name nor his given name be used to protect his and his familys privacy, grew up in Chappaqua, the affluent Westchester suburb that is home to the Clintons, and had a relatively ordinary, middle-class Jewish childhood....

Hey he must have gone through some serious hormone therapy, hairy arms fairly deep voice. It was very disturbing. I think the class was actually discussing that sort of thing when he dropped that bomb shell.

Someday it would be fun to argue with one of these girls. Point out to them that they’ve only changed the outside. Their skeletons would still invariably be sexed as female by any anthropologist, and a thousand years from now when they’re dug up and put on display, it will say “woman” forever.

There has been a lot of propaganda to bring about this result. From the article:

The idea that he might actually want to transition from female to male began to take shape for Rey when he was 14 or 15; ... A transmale speaker guy gave a talk at a meeting of his high schools Gay Straight Alliance, and Rey was inspired. ...

At the end of his freshman year in high school, he met Melissa, ... Melissa, who was immersed in campus gender activism, mentioned the concept of being a transman and spoke of her transmale friends. Rey confided his questions about his gender identity to her, and she encouraged him to explore them further. For most of high school, Rey spent hours online reading about transgendered people and their lives. The Internet is the best thing for trans people, he said. Living in the suburbs, online groups were an access point. He also started reading memoirs of transgendered people. He asked Melissa to explain the gender theory she was learning in college.

In addition, 147 colleges and universities nationwide now include gender identity and expression in their nondiscrimination policies, and students will often use gender-neutral pronouns like ze and hir  especially if they post on campus message boards. At Wesleyan last year, students initiated a survey of bathrooms, checking to see if they were transgender-friendly  open to all sexes. Many colleges now have Transgender Days of Remembrance in memory of victims of gender-identity-related hate crimes.

As Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Female Masculinity, put it, feminist theory offers students a way to think about gender as performance, to create a trans self or a genderqueer one  and give that self contours, definition  in a way that was simply unavailable 30 years ago.

I dunno, I’ve heard rumblings that a substantial proportion of transsexuals end up regretting their choice but that, like abortion and breast cancer, those figures are suppressed by the usual suspects. I’m willing to bet, that the cause of gender dysmorphic disorder is not so mysterious after all, that most of it’s victims, like nearly all gays, were in fact molested as very young children.

Sorry, Nucsubs, but as a highly trained professional Art Historian, I beg to differ.

The Greeks idealized the man-boy love relationship to such an extent that they painted the pornographic subject on pottery. Lots of pottery. There are people who collect it (no doubt for the salaciousness of the subject), and in museums it is usually kept in the storage areas accessible only to staff. We unlucky few are, ahem, exposed to it. (Sorry for the pun.)

I take it from your handle that you were in the Nuclear Sub Fleet. I was, for six years, a Navy linguist (CTI).

Among particular social and economic cadres of the ancient world, there was certainly nothing deemed wrong with homosexual liaisons under accepted protocols. On the other hand, for the vast majority of rural folk in the Mediterranean world, heterosexuality and marriage were, of course, the norms. The pre-Christian poor and agrarian classes considered homosexual acts deviant, not on religious grounds of sinfulness, but rather as proof of corruption and decadence that were the wages of too much money and too much time in town.

This is merely the one quote I could find quickly online. I have read several books by him and he makes it quite clear that homosexuality was neither "rampant" nor celebrated. It was accepted in very narrow terms and considered a pathology of the very wealthy (hence the surviving art evidence you point to and the persistence of the myth). Your argument comes from the likes of Cahill who is a liberal hack next to Hanson.

I was in from 85-92, See my profile.

31
posted on 03/19/2008 2:17:46 AM PDT
by NucSubs
(Democrat:: one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.)

> “...It was accepted in very narrow terms and considered a pathology of the very wealthy...” <

Good catch. That statement sounds like it would be closer to the “norm” for the majority who are usually voiceless. Why? Unfortunately rural folk in the ancient world didn’t write the histories - they couldn’t write much less read. To receive an education one had to have wealth - so guess who wrote the histories?

Interest in how ancient peoples lived, other than the very wealthy, has been of increasing interest during the last half of the 20th century, something I believe we Americans fostered. Personally I’m glad to see it.

Western Civilization’s classical perception of the ancient world has tended to be fixed by the interests of 18th-19th century Europeans, a group whose backgrounds were anything but middleclass. The homosexual agenda goes way back.

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